VDH: Obama’s Roman republic
Victor Davis Hanson has posted his latest “Works and Days” which ends with this grand-slam.
At some point, Obama may conclude that the vast presidential jet, the opulence of the Presidency, the power and influence at his fingertips, all that national wealth and more were not created by Acorn, community organizing, Michelle’s legal brilliance, Axelrod’s savvy advice, or Emanuel’s crassness, or by claiming that doctors needlessly take out tonsils and amputate limbs, or in general by sonorous tones promising to give someone vast amounts of someone else’s money, but rather through preserving a climate of freedom, respect for continuity and tradition, and government non-intrusion into the market place that encourage people to try to go into business and retain some of their profits—as recompense for getting up on Saturday morning at 6AM to get down to open the dry cleaning store, or borrowing one’s net worth to open a new stationary outlet, or staying late till 7PM to do a crown, or gambling that the new $500,000 crane will pay for itself in 5 years, or going under someone’s house on a Sunday to unclog the toilet when the employee doesn’t show up.
I expect him soon either to continue as is and face a historic rebuke in 2010, or to begin scrambling to talk about the debt, fiscal sobriety, and American exceptionalism—his Carter or Clinton call.
These are the most interesting of times: we are witnessing nothing less than an attempt in just 10 months to reinvent the United States at home and abroad into something it never was, led by someone who, the more soothing, comforting, and melodic his speech-making, the more bruising, cut-throat, and ruthless the act that follows.
So it’s like we’re living in the late Roman Republic …
Given my recent return to the campus, I’m used to hearing how “stupid” those who oppose all those minor taxes. FDR made all our lives better, they say. FDR enacted the legislation (the consequences of which most are likely to dismiss), but it was the American economy after World War II that paid for it all – without any of that, you don’t have Social Security, you don’t have WIC, you don’t have Welfare – you don’t have much of anything, but a giant tax base and a giant dependent class. The country was lucky, because under any other environment it would have drowned in all the new entitlement and government, and it did for several years prior to World War II and into the 40s. Things would have been much different if Europe and Japan were cranking side-by-side with America through the 50s.
Those union wages are paid because the company it worked for made money and survived. Unions, specifically the SEIU and the UAW, aren’t concerned with their companies surviving as much as exacting their pound of flesh. My dad worked at a GM supplier that went bankrupt – the union’s response to this news? Go on strike. That makes sense if your mentality is that of a 2-year-old, not if you have eyes on the future or care a lick about the Golden Goose. Truth is, most on the left don’t.
We’re told how great the academics and politicians are, but never the businessmen, the entrepreneur or those who take the chances, make the money, pay the employees and make the wheels turn. The left makes corporate big-wigs their targets, the truth is they despise small business just as much, why else enact the policies they do? Ask Michael Moore of his thoughts on those small-town businesses, you’ll hear plenty of smarmy condemnation.
Given my chosen field of liberal arts, I think some of my conservative friends and family were worried if I would go native, maybe even myself. But the more I hear the same, tired explanations the more convinced that the secrets to life and success are found in freedom and individual ambition. An example, I’m told liberals believe taxes are a great way to adjust social behavior, more specifically, to discourage bad behavior like smoking. If it works to keep people from buying beer or cigarettes, why can’t they understand the effect is the same when taxing wealth? Taxing work means less work – seems like a simple concept, but what do I know – I spent a lifetime working for small businesses, small branch outlets, with my hands or in small towns before I quit real work and became a writer. I wasn’t contributing to the GDP one tenured contract at a time.
What Hanson is getting at, we have a president and a leadership class disconnected with how the rest of the country functions. They have no interest in knowing how or why it works, in fact they find disdain for its very existence. The fall of the Roman republic? Maybe, but I don’t think so, because for too long one way worked and their way hasn’t. The Roman people didn’t have much choice in their fate, but Americans do – I think in the end that makes the difference.
Sure hope voters choose to preserve the republic, next year. Will Obama have one of these – http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/ – or is he so indoctrinated, we’d have to kidnap him and go through months of deprogramming.
Really respect VDH, but I can’t take seriously his first sentence, suggesting that BO “may” actually acknowledge economic reality.
If there’s anything we know about this solipsistic clown, it’s that he’s dead certain he knows the most effective route to every liberal fantasy, and if his particular diagnosis happens to conflict with reality, then most certainly the problem is with reality, not with him.
Additional quibble – the SEIU members, I’m certain, have no concerns about running their employer into the dirt (ala the UAW). For too many of the SEIU that employer is the government, and short some Patrick Henry inspired backlash, the gub’mint ain’t goin’ nowhere anytime soon.
The problem is not that the Obama administration doesn’t know what it’s doing — they’re too smart for that. Nor is the problem that they know exactly what they’re doing — they’re clearly not competent enough.
The real difficulty we’re having to deal with here is that these people think that they know what they’re doing.
You nailed it, Jake!
Very well stated, Stosh.
I suspect History only partially repeats itself. That there are common patterns that we should be aware of, but we should be on the alert for the differences. Comparing ourselves to the late Republic might be a case in point. When the Republic was coming apart, it was due to talented men working against each other for their advantage. There were Pompeii, Crassus, Caesar, Cicero, and the others…we don’t have anyone near in stature, though they all have ambition enough. Now, the problem is, what comes next with these shallow looters? I suspect something far less than empire.
I actually think that their long-term plan is to push a bunch of the states into seceding again — nothing would please them more than to see the world’s most powerful country Balkanized into a bunch of petty rogue states. Plus, ever since the South lost the Civil War, the Democrats would then have a pretext for literally declaring war on the rest of us.
solipsistic
+++++++++++++++++
Stosh used my new favorite word….ok…back to serious!
During the 1990s, when people would compare the Clintons to some Roman Emperor like Nero or Caligula, or how we were soon to collapse like the Empire, I liked to point out that we were more like that period after the Third Punic War and the time when Rome began a half-millenium of unchallenged dominance of the Mediterranean. That was the time when “bread-and-circuses” began, along with he first of the populists (damn I can’t remember their names, the Gracchi?) who advanced a crude form of socialism. They set the stage for the warring generals. I figured it would be decades before we encountered our Sulla or Caesar and the end of “republicanism”.
Instead, with Obama we seem to have skipped several centuries and gone straight to electing President Elagabalus.
dang, just re-read my post…meant Pompey not Pompeii…Elagabalus, nice choice. Now, who else has a candidate emperor?
The problem with Academia is that its structure is essentially that of a socialist state: actual achievement means nothing, vocal and vigorous adherence to an ideological ideal means all. Promotion is determined by vote of those most heavily invested in the dominant ideology. Remember, an “expert” is merely somebody whose mastery of the conventional wisdom is ratified by those who personify the CW. View this as an Ouroboros … or as a professor with head firmly planted in the other end of the g-i tract.
Elagabulus was just a fun loving little teenage pervert…they say he would ride around in a chariot pulled by a bevy of naked girls.
He didn’t do that while holding a chicken under each arm, did he?
‘Cause that’s my bit.
Sounds a lot like Rich’s birthday party a couple of month’s back (great party, by the way).
I think we are also seeing the end result of 45 years of hippie/leftist ideology. A couple of generations nurtured, whether they knew it or not, on the noxious gas of a Chomsky or Zinn. All this reinforced by the rise of technological thrills and gadgets.
the message is two fold: One – the reason we are a greedy faulty cowboy empire is because of capitalism. It is the root cause. If only the founder fathers had been founding comissars, then the nightmare of slavery, indian genocide, robber barrons, jim crow laws etc. would not have happened. They instead took the red pill, and all was lost. Liberals, and only they, are the ones who understand this. Two – PC is the true reality, not the profit based rape system of before. Wander off the reservation and we’ll take you to the woodshed. Look what we did to a sitting president, as well as palin, conservative media, etc etc. Believe it, and get back to work.
The problem they don’t see in their blindness is that 80%of the country is not buying this. No matter how big their megaphone, they cannot completely control the Narrative. And the more they attempt it the more they are revealed as sham.
The cure for liberals – put them out in the market place. Let them talk of what they really care about,what they really believe. the audience finds out rather quickly libs are strangers to reality. I can only hope they are stopped before they inflict, or start, damage to the structure itself.
Mr. Sideous,
I think it’s a bit more fundamental, and on that I agree with VDH. Like the typical Roman citizen near the end of the Empire, most of us Americans have gotten way too far away from the work we humans were built to do. It’s not quite the right term, but we’ve got way too much leisure and our big, homo-sapien brains have to make up stuff to keep us occupied in the absence of actual work.
Look at how much of our time as a society is spent on trivial issues. How many women do you know who are “stressed?” Feel completely overwhelmed? Yet they do 1/10th the amount of labor women in prior generations did. How many men do you know who complain about their jobs and their “workload?” Yet they do less than 1/10th the amount of labor men in prior generations did.
Our lives have become too easy. We don’t grow or harvest what we eat. We don’t kill and dress what we eat. We don’t build our shelters. We get in a car, turn a key and go wherever we choose. We don’t even change our own oil anymore. What percentage of kids under 25 now where the oil pan or oil filter is on a car? We don’t even learn to make music. We sample the music of composers who came before us, or we play colored keys in unison with patterns on a video screen and pretend we are “guitar heroes.”
We don’t appreciate the freedom and liberty we have, nor do we understand the cold reality that there are people in the world actively working to take it from us, because we have no concept of what it took to get us where we are. We don’t even understand where our breakfast comes from, how can you expect us to understand where our democracy comes from?